About Me

Hi! I’m William “Lee” Dubois (called either Wil or Lee, depending what part of the internet you’re on). I’m a diabetes columnist and the author of four books about diabetes that have collectively won 16 national and international book awards. (Hey, if you can’t brag about yourself on your own blog, where can you??) I have the great good fortune to pen the edgy Dear Abby-style advice column every Saturday at Diabetes Mine; write the Diabetes Simplified column for dLife; and am one of the ShareCare diabetes experts. My work also appears in Diabetic Living and Diabetes Self-Management magazines. In addition to writing, I’ve spent the last half-dozen years running the diabetes education program for a rural non-profit clinic in the mountains of New Mexico. Don’t worry, I’ll get some rest after the cure. LifeAfterDx is my personal home base, where I get to say what and how I feel about diabetes and… you know… life, free from the red pens of editors (all of whom I adore, of course!).

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Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Happy anniversary, baby.

Yesterday was my one week anniversary on the Guardian. It seems like a good time for a review. So do I like it? Absolutely. Is it worth what it has cost me? Double absolutely. Would I do it again? Triple absolutely.

If someone put a gun to my head and made me choose between the Guardian and my pump, which would I choose? Hmmmm.....that’s a tough call, but I think the new girl would win. You can have very good control with shots, although I found it hard to do. In theory you have better control on the pump, but I’ve found that’s not always the case either. I think if you had to choose, the real value is in knowing your sugar and reacting as needed...the method of control is less important than the control itself. Guardian gives you the real time, all-the-time info you need to keep in control. (That having been said I’m in nooooo hurry to be rid of my pump!)

We’ve had a few hiccups this week, but for the most part everything has gone very, very smoothly. I did have some trouble with the second sensor, especially on one particular day, but the rest of the time the numbers have been dead on with my BG meter. I did lose telemetry, which scared/depressed me at the time, but now I know what to do if it happens again and I will recognize it as a minor inconvenience, not a travesty.

The security of having an early warning system has been great. The convince of performing post-meal BG checks with a glance and a click has been wonderful.

....and, this is big folks; I haven’t even scratched the surface of the other 50% of the reason for having a Guardian: analyzing the BG data and making therapy adjustments. Why haven’t I done that? Well, it has been Thanksgiving week. Nuff’ said.

Are there some things I don’t like about it? Well, I do have a few gripes. In no particular order they are:

The battery indicator (or lack there of). She'll let me know 8 hours out that the battery needs to be replaced. But that is all the warning I get. I just know it will always be at 2 in the morning when that alarm goes off. My Cozmo, my PDA, my lap-top, my cell phone, and my digital cameras all have little indicators that tell you about how much juice is left. You can glace at any of them before going to bed and say, “well that'll be OK until morning,” or you can do something about it if it looks really low.

A BG trend indicator would be really nice. I can look at my current reading, I can scroll backwards and see what it was 5, 10 ,15 minutes ago. But an arrow showing an up trend or a down trend would be nice.

There is a nice, bright back light for the screen when you use it at night, however, it does not light up the keys. The keys are “raised” so in theory you can feel them, but in reality, when she’s in her case you can’t feel them through the clear vinyl.

I have a few quibbles about the software, but I’ll get into that when I post about the software in detail in a few days. So: full report to follow, and mostly thumbs up!

I had expected to have a love/hate relationship with the transmitter due to its size and weight. But in reality this has turned into a non-issue and I never even think about it. I’m on my third set, and each time the transmitter has been on a different location on my stomach. In all three places it is NOT at bother what-so-ever.

I also got over my attack of chicken-shitness and used the inserter on Monday when I put in my third sensor. It worked great, was much faster, and drew no blood. I’m going to use the inserter from now on.

These are all minor bitches, things you might hope to see changed in the next generation Guardian, but none of them are deal killers, because, what is my blood sugar, you ask? Well, I don’t know, let me check. Click. 131. Thank you for asking. Hee hee hee. I never get sick of doing that!

1 Comments:

I can't tell you how exciting it is to read your account-- especially since what you're using here is really the first generation of a technology that (as we've seen with the pump) will most certainly evolve rapidly as more users (like you) provide feedback to developers.

Thanks again for the extremely well-written entries on one of the true "Holy Grails" for those with diabetes.